Pegasus Descending

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “Were you in ’ Nam? Dallas was. He’s a good kid.”

The collector got off the barstool and combed his hair, his eyes roving over the crooked smile on my face, the booze stains on my shirt, the table-wet on the sleeves of my new jacket, the fact that I had to keep one arm on the bar to steady myself. “I stacked time in a place you couldn’t imagine in your worst dreams,” he said.

“Yeah, I’ve heard the bitch suite up at Raiford is a hard ride,” I said.

He put away his comb and looked at his reflection in the bar mirror. His cheeks were pooled with tiny pits, like the incisions of a knifepoint. He placed a roll of breath mints by my hand. “No, go ahead and take them. Gratis from Elmer Fudd. Enjoy.”

MY TENURE WITH the exchange program was ru

But wherever I went, a frozen daiquiri winked at me from an outdoor bar roofed by palm fronds; beaded cans of Budweiser protruded from the ice in a fisherman’s cooler; a bottle of Cold Duck clamped between a woman’s thighs burst alive with the pop of a cork and a geyser of foam.

Delirium tremens or not, I knew I was in for the whole ride.

During my last week in Miami, I drove up to Opa-Locka to pay my bar tab and buy a round for whoever was trying to escape the noonday heat. The bar was dark and cool inside, the street out beyond the colo

By three-thirty I was seriously in the bag. Across the street, I saw an armored car pull up in front of the bank. It was a shimmering box-like vehicle with a red-and-white paint job that pulsed in the heat like a fresh dental extraction. Three armed guards piled out, opened up the back, and began to lift big canvas satchels with padlocks on the tops onto the pavement. One of the guards was Dallas Klein.

I crossed the street, my drink in one hand, shading my eyes from the glare with the other.

“Where you been, fellow? I’ve had to knock ’em back for both of us,” I said.

Dallas was standing in the shade of the bank, the armpits of his gray shirt dark with moisture. “I’m on the job, here, Dave. Catch you later,” he said.

“What time you get off?”

“I said beat it.”

“Say again?”

“This is a security area. You’re not supposed to be here.”

“You’ve got things mixed up, podna. I’m a police officer.”

“What you are is shit-faced. Now stop making an ass out of yourself and go back in the bar.”

I turned around and walked toward the colo

“Something wrong, Dave?” the bartender asked.

“Yeah, my glass is empty. Double Beam, beer back,” I said.

While he poured into a shot glass from a bourbon bottle with a chrome nipple on it, I blotted the humidity out of my eyes with a paper napkin, my ears still ringing from the insult Dallas had delivered me. I looked back out the window at the armored car. But the scene had suddenly become surreal, divorced from any of my expectations about that day in my life. A white van came out of nowhere and braked behind the armored car. Four men with cut-down shotguns jumped out on the sidewalk, leaving the driver behind the wheel. They were all dressed in work clothes, their hair and facial features a beige-colored blur under nylon stockings.

“Call nine-one-one, say, ‘Armed robbery in progress,’ and give this address,” I said to the bartender.

I unsnapped the.25 automatic that was strapped to my right ankle. When I got off the barstool, one side of the room seemed to collapse under my foot.

“I wouldn’t go out there,” the bartender said.

“I’m a cop,” I said.

I thought my grandiose words could somehow change the condition I was in. But in the bartender’s eyes I saw a sad knowledge that no amount of rhetoric would ever influence. I walked unsteadily to the front door and jerked it open. The outside world ballooned through the door in a rush of superheated air and carbon monoxide. The street I looked out upon was no longer a part of South Florida. It was a wind-sculpted place in the desert, bleached the color of a biscuit by the sun, home to carrion birds and jackals and blowflies. It was the place that awaits us all, one we don’t allow ourselves to see in our dreams. The.25 auto felt as small and light as plastic in my hand.

I positioned myself behind one of the Arabic columns under the colo

But the men robbing the armored car did little more than glance in my direction, as they would at a minor a

A teller was already pushing the vault door shut. The robber shot him at point-blank range.

When the shooter emerged from the bank, he was dragging two satchels that were whipsawed with blood, his pump propped against his hip.

“I said on your faces, you motherfuckers!” I shouted.

The first shotgun blast from the robbers on the sidewalk patterned all over the column and the metal door of the bar. A second one caved the window. Then the robbers were shooting at me in unison, blowing dust and powdered stone in the air, peppering the metal door with indentations that looked like shiny nickels.

I crouched at the bottom of the column, unable to move or return fire without being chewed up. Then I heard someone shouting, “Go, go, go, go!” and the sounds of the van doors slamming shut.

It should have been over. But it wasn’t. As the van pulled away from the curb, I was sure I heard the robber in the passenger seat speak to Dallas. “You’re a joke, man,” he said. Then he extended his shotgun straight out from the vehicle and blew most of Dallas Klein’s head off.